Education
Peterhouse.
Peterhouse.
Blond was a senior lecturer in Christian theology at the University of Cumbria and was a lecturer in the Department of Theology at the University of Exeter. According to Blond, these two large-scale realities, while usually spoken of as diametrically opposed, are in reality the two sides of the same coin. In 2010, The Telegraph called him "a driving force behind David Cameron"s "Big Society" agenda." West.
Blond was the director of the Progressive Conservatism Project at the London-based think-tank Demos, but left due to "political and philosophical differences" to establish his own think-tank, ResPublica. Blond gained prominence from a cover story in Prospect magazine in the February 2009 edition with his essay on Red Toryism, which proposed a radical communitarian traditionalist conservatism that inveighed against both state and market monopoly. As he explains it, modern and postmodern individualism and statism have always been connected of the hip, at least since the advent of Rousseau"s thought, if not well before that in the work of Hobbes.
In a series of articles in both The Guardian and The Independent he has argued for a wider recognition of the merits of civic conservatism and an appreciation of the potentially transformative impact of a new Tory settlement.
Born in Liverpool and educated at Pensby High School for Boys, Blond went on to study philosophy and politics at the University of Hull, continental philosophy at the University of Warwick and theology at Peterhouse at the University of Cambridge.